How To Harness Your Mindset in the Practice Room to Grow Your Income

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”

We’ve all read this quote by Henry Ford, most likely on a yellowed poster stuck to the walls of our high school with way too much sticky tack. It’s been repeated often enough to become something of a cliché.

But here’s what we tend to forget about clichés: like great musical works that are played over and over (Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the prelude to Bach’s first cello suite, Barber’s Adagio for Strings), they’re repeated for a reason. Something about these works or words still resonates hundreds of years after they were first heard.

What Henry Ford is referring to in his quote is what psychologists call a “growth mindset.”

What is a growth mindset?

First popularized by psychologist Carol Dweck, a growth mindset is the belief that your skill in any given area can be improved through hard work, study, and dedication.

When you practice your instrument to improve your craft, you are exhibiting a growth mindset. If you respond to a rocky audition or not getting the position you want by making a plan and working harder, that also shows that you have a growth mindset. No professional musician has reached the level they’re at without adopting a growth mindset.

Why doesn’t our growth mindset in the practice room translate to growth in our careers?

Given that a growth mindset is essential to succeeding as a professional musician, it’s shocking how many musicians don’t have a growth mindset when it comes to their finances.

The opposite of a growth mindset is a “fixed mindset” —the “think you can’t” part of Ford’s quote. A fixed mindset rejects the idea of growth and improvement, instead believing that your current skill level can’t be improved through hard work and study. 

Way too many musicians limit themselves by adopting a fixed mindset when it comes to their earning potential. You probably know a dozen musicians who fit this description:

• The overworked, underpaid public school band or orchestra director who juggles teaching instrumental technique, administrative deadlines, planning elaborate field trips for hundreds of students, and being a psychologist to both students and parents, yet doesn’t see how their skills are valued outside of their current position.

• The orchestral musician with a master’s degree who drives their decades old car from regional orchestra to regional orchestra, learning complex music incredibly quickly all while networking and making connections, only to accept less money then they’d make working in food service without question.

• The gigging musician who sightreads complicated pieces as easily as most people read books, yet searches for meaning in their work because they’re jaded after performing for yet another bridezilla whose marriage only has a 50% success rate anyway.

Too often, we let the fixed mindset that comes with the starving artist cliché control our finances.

What most professional musicians don’t see is that our skills are incredibly valuable, and the money we earn should reflect this.

What if we started treating our finances the way we treat practicing our instruments? What would that look like?

It would look like not sticking with a job we have grown to resent for years because we don’t believe we have value in any other industry. It might look like using our skill as educators to develop and sell new curriculum for teachers.

It might look like planning a concert series, then finding sponsors and advertisers to fund it.

It might look like investing in career coaching to figure out the true value of your skills and how you can earn money doing what you love.

It might look like networking with people who have the type of career you want.

It might look like stepping outside your comfort zone by taking teacher training or playing a different genre of music.

And while it might feel scary or uncomfortable, when you look back at this period of transition in your life years later, it will look like this: growth.

Too often, we accept the meager pay we’re given rather than leveraging our skills to earn the money we deserve. The cliché of the starving artist? Unlike Beethoven’s Fifth or Henry Ford’s quote, this cliché doesn’t deserve to last.